OUR OPINION: DPH must suspend provisional medical marijuana licenses

The revelations this week that the Department of Public Health's licensing process for medical marijuana dispensaries was rife with ethical lapses comes as no surprise to anyone who's been following this story.

The revelations this week that the Department of Public Health's licensing process for medical marijuana dispensaries was rife with ethical lapses comes as no surprise to anyone who's been following this story. What does confound us, however, is why administrators at DPH did everything within their power to create the scandal.

All along, we have been calling for transparency and care in implementing the medical marijuana ballot initiative, which passed in November 2012. As early as January 2013, we supported legislation to delay implementation so that DPH could conscientiously and without haste vet applications for the up 35 licenses it was authorized to award.

On Dec. 5, we asked DPH for the names of those who would serve on the selection committee to evaluate and score Phase 2 applications. Those were the applications that originally were to be sent to DPH Commissioner Cheryl Bartlett, who would ultimately decide which organizations would receive the licenses. We were stonewalled.

In that editorial, we noted that Bartlett had contributed $500 in October 2007 to her friend, former U.S. Rep. William Delahunt's political action committee – and that he had applied for three licenses for his group, Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts.

In a Jan. 23 editorial, we called for an independent agency to vet DPH's licensing process because of its complete and utter lack of transparency. We warned that something was amiss when on Jan. 13, days before the licenses were to be awarded, DPH announced a newly appointed executive director of the medical marijuana program would make the final selection – not Bartlett, as DPH had announced since the process started last spring.

When asked directly why Bartlett was recusing herself – which was what we had advocated – spokesman David Kibbe said only that it had always been the intention to hire someone to oversee the program.

Not exactly.

This week, we learned that Bartlett filed a conflict-of-interest disclosure form with the state on Dec. 31, declaring that she had held two fundraisers in 2005 and 2006 for Delahunt's re-election to Congress. While she may have complied with the letter of the ethics law, it certainly appears that she did a disservice to its spirit.

Then we learned that two applicants who had been awarded licenses may have falsified information in their applications. They erroneously claimed to have the support of local elected officials. Apparently, no one on that board, the one DPH refused to disclose to us until a few weeks before the awards were made, bothered to actually vet the applications.

Of course, questions are swirling as to how it was that Delahunt, Bartlett's friend, was awarded three of the 20 licenses. He received a score of 160 out of 163 on each application, the highest of all applicants. We don't know how or why because DPH refuses to release the detailed scores. It apparently doesn't matter to Bartlett and her team that they're public documents.

Page 2 of 2 - What Bartlett and her colleagues at DPH don't seem to grasp is that the truth is its own defense. If they had acted with full transparency from the beginning, disclosed even the slightest appearance of impropriety, DPH could have avoided yet another scandal. And it's that kind of questionable judgment that tarnishes the entire process and everyone associated with it.

We're pleased to see that Speaker of the House Robert DeLeo has called for the Legislature to investigate the licensing process. And in order to assure the public that absolutely no political relationships might color the findings, we call on Inspector General Glenn Cunha to undertake a concurrent, separate investigation into the awarding of medical marijuana dispensary licenses.

In the meantime, the provisional dispensary licenses should be rescinded in hopes of avoiding lawsuits that are surely being considered by those who paid $30,000 to apply and were denied.

As we said more than a year ago, we must delay implementation of medical marijuana until we have a system of checks and balances in place that are fair, honorable and transparent. This one clearly is not.